All problems – one solution – Have healthy lifestyle

Author: havehealthylifestyle

I am Dr Sangita Daithankar, Homoeopathic consultant and Nutritionist practising since 16 years.
I believe if we follow some healthy habits in our routine, we can get a healthy lifestyle. Healthy lifestyle means healthy mind and body. If we have healthy lifestyle, we can prevent and control all kind of lifestyle diseases like Hypertension, Diabetes, Hypothyroidism, cancer and many more......
To have a healthy lifestyle we should have some knowledge about it. I would be very happy to share knowledge to have a healthy lifestyle. Your reviews about the blogs are very important for me to share a good quality knowledge with you.
So let's follow the things which will give us a healthy lifestyle.

“To have a healthy mind we require a healthy body and to have a healthy body, we need a healthy mind.” A healthy diet is essential for a well-functioning body. Food is the source of energy for all of our body functions. There are a variety of reasons why a healthy diet is important, including… Continue reading Why a healthy diet is important?

Meditation is a cleansing process through self-observation, which not only helps us to reduce stress but also trains our mind not to get stressed. It’s the best way to manage stress.

Meditation is a state of thoughtless awareness in which the excessive stress producing activity of the mind is neutralized without reducing alertness and effectiveness.

Benefits of meditation:

Meditation not only helps to avoid and reduce stress but is also proven to be an effective way of enhancing the quality of life by improving physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing. There are numerous benefits of meditation, here mentioning some of them.

Meditation helps us,

to avoid our reactions

to cope up with the situation

to make a balance in the body and our life

to be in the present

to stay away from negative emotions

to cleanse our mind by removing accumulated negative emotions

to make our mind calm and clear

to polish our cognitive functions like concentration, memory etc.

to avoid and reduce stress, in turn helping us to prevent and maintain all lifestyle diseases

to increase the Immunity, which in turn helps us to protect from infectious diseases

It is very simple but not so easy. We need to practice it daily as much as possible to experience its effects. To start with we can do it for minimum 10 minutes to as long as possible. Once you get habituated with practicing regular meditation, you will enjoy its benefits.

We can do meditation in 2 stages,

Observation of Breathing Pattern

Take a comfortable sitting position and close your eyes. Now focus all your attention to your breath. Observe your breath “as it is”, do not try to change it. It may be fast or slow, warm or cold. It may come from right nostril and go from left nostril or vice versa. We can follow the breath while inhaling and exhaling.

As I said it’s simple but not easy. So while you are trying to focus your attention on your breath, your mind will wander here and there. It will either go in past or future. You will get the thoughts about the past incidences, where you had reacted and these have got accumulated in your subconscious mind. We do not think much about these past incidences, but they are present in our subconscious mind. We can feel that stored emotion because of our attachment to that emotion. This emotion can be an anger, fear, insulted feeling, neglected feeling etc. And what is inside you, only that will come out. Sometimes we feel that why I got angry for such a silly reason? The reason is inside you and not outside. And to remove this reason we are doing Meditation.

We can also get thoughts about our future worries and insecurities. We get so much attached to them that they go deep inside our subconscious mind. And they come out in an exaggerated form as a reaction to small things.

So what we will do when these thoughts will intrude our mind while we are trying to focus on the breath?

We will observe them “AS IT IS” as we are observing our breath and “LET IT GO”. We should not feel the same emotion with that thought. We should look at them as we are watching a movie, without any emotional involvement. When we see a quarrel or fighting scene in movie, we do not feel like fighting.

By this process, you are letting go all accumulated emotions to which we have got attached. And these are the root cause of our sufferings.

When you observe these emotions as it is and let them go, you should again focus on your breath. Again your mind will wander into some deep-seated emotion or thought or incidence. The Same process will continue while you observe your breath.

In this stage of meditation, we are learning to observe everything “AS IT IS” without any emotional involvement, it can be inside or outside. Eg. I will not get scared of the cockroach; I will observe him and act. If someone is behaving badly, I will observe how he is reacting because of his internal suffering; and our action will be to try to help him or go away without any emotional involvement.

So by practicing the first stage of meditation, we are not only detaching our deep-seated emotions, desires, which are the root cause of our sufferings but to also train our mind to look at everything, inside and outside “AS IT IS”.

We can be aware of our breathing in any situation, at any time and not only while meditating, it will help us to be in present moment or reality.

Observation of Sensation

Before you start this stage, observe your breath at least for10 minutes.

Then start scanning your body from head to foot and vice versa. While doing so we may feel any kind of sensation like pain, contracting sensation, heat or cold, itching, crawling, tingling, numbness, stiffness etc.

Bodily sensations are whatever we feel in the body, in the present moment. Bodily sensations are temporary and changing in nature. They have the characteristics of arising, staying for some time and passing.

For example, we may get the sensation of intense pain within our body. An unpleasant feeling may arise associated with the bodily sensation. You may feel getting up from your sitting position. This creates an unpleasant state of mind and reaction to these unpleasant feelings, thoughts, and states of mind; we react with aversion and try to suppress it. The more we suppress the sensation, the more it will arise, the more we will suffer from a miserable state of mind, and the more we will react, we create a vicious cycle of reaction within us.

We should aware of the impermanent nature of sensations and let them go without reacting to them with craving (like) and aversion (dislike). We should remain balanced and aware of the unconscious cycle of reaction within us.

All thoughts, emotions and states of mind which are associated with these sensations arise, stay for some time and pass within awareness.

Once the sensation will pass, we return again to scanning our body.

We can practice being aware of our bodily movements and sensations during daily life. Practice may lead to awareness of seeing things as they are in the present moment.

By practicing this we are training our mind to observe the emotions or situations without reacting to it because it is going to change after some period. By not doing so we are going to suffer.

We need to meditate daily for a cleansing process, as we clean our body daily. It helps us to remove all accumulated negative emotions, desires, attachments which are the root cause of all sufferings.

I hope you will find this information helpful to live a peaceful life.

In the earlier articles, we have discussed about stress, in simple terms, stress is a reaction to certain situation. Stress – How it affects our lifestyle ? “ALWAYS REMEMBER PROBLEM IS NOT A PROBLEM, BUT YOUR REACTION TO THE PROBLEM IS PROBLEM” If you tend to get stressed out frequently, as many of us do… Continue reading Stress management through lifestyle changes

As we all learnt in the last article that problem is not a problem, but reaction is the problem, but then why do we react ? Stress – How it affects our lifestyle ? We react when our expectations do not get fulfilled, but why do we have these expectations ? We have these expectations… Continue reading Stress – How to cope up with it?

In the last article, we have discussed the factors which affect our lifestyle. Stress is one of the most important factors which affect our lives and that is the reason we have 90% of psychosomatic illnesses. What is stress ? Stress – How to cope up with it? Stress management through lifestyle changes … Continue reading Stress – How it affects our lifestyle ?

One day our life is going to end, but what matters is how we lived till our end. Here our lifestyle plays a major role and it determines the quality of our life. None of us wants to die with suffering or dependency, but for that we have to have some knowledge about how to live a healthy lifestyle.

It’s not that we don’t have any knowledge, but we are always lacking in implementation.

These are the factors which determine the quality of our lifestyle or the level of health. According to our level of health, we get sickness and it also decides the intensity and duration of sickness.

I am sure till now you have understood that we are not going to get optimum health till we are not maintaining all above factors together.

I will tell you a story of a person who was obsessive about his physical fitness. He exercised whenever he got the time. He had healthy food and good water intake. He used to sleep late and got up early for the exercises.

If we study this case he was doing great things but there was no synergy in all factors which gives us a healthy lifestyle. If we observe properly, his lifestyle was lacking in proper sleep and because of sleep debt, he died of heart attack at an early age.

Sleep is essential for a healthy heart. People who don’t sleep enough are at higher risk for cardiovascular disease, regardless of age, weight, smoking and exercise habits.

One study that examined data from 3,000 adults over the age of 45 found that those who slept fewer than six hours per night were about twice as likely to have a stroke or heart attack as people who slept seven to eight hours per night.

Now we can understand the importance of each factor. We can’t ignore a single factor if we really want to have a healthy lifestyle.

‘Synergy‘ is the keyword and we need to keep it to have a healthy lifestyle.What do you mean by keeping Synergy?

Synergy means to follow all factors together. When we try to live stress-free life, do proper daily exercises, have balance diet, keep proper hydration and take proper sleep all together, then we are keeping proper synergy.

If we can do this, it will lead us to live a peaceful and healthy life.

We need to understand each factor in detail and should incorporate healthy habits in our routine.

Mental attitude: It is the most important factor to have a healthy lifestyle. We should always live in the present moment to have a stress free life.

Physical activity: We should do some physical activity at least 30 mins per day, so that our cells can get oxygen and nutrients for optimum functioning.

Diet: We should concentrate on adding more healthy food in our diet rather than worrying about having wrong food.

Water: Our body is made up of approx. 65% of water. Water helps in many ways to keep our body healthy. It helps to remove toxins from our body and maintain our health.

Sleep: It helps to repair the damage of the cells, which occurs throughout the day.